How can marketers satisfy this unquenchable desire for new content? One technology that helps tackle the need for developing and delivering a constant stream of personalized content to customers is natural language generation (NLG).

March 2005 Issue

News Features

Nearly a decade ago, Margaret Bodde, co-executive director of the Film Foundation, began having a discussion with Martin Scorsese about how best to teach film to a broader audience than simply those studying film in college. "We started to see that if kids aren't introduced or exposed to films from the past, they'd have no motivation to protect them for the future," explains Bodde, so the Film Foundation was established with the express purposes of preserving film and educating the public.

In the fee-based info world, this has been borne out by the increasing problem of information overload and the savvy content user’s preference for packaged content offerings that simplify the job at hand. The fact is that information is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Different users have different needs and, importantly, different sized organizations have different budgets for that information. OneSource Information Services, long known for its high-end business information product, Business Browser, has moved into the small to medium business information strata with the introduction of OneSource Express.

The potential combination of Time Warner and Sprint, which was still only in the discussion phase as of January, has caused a great deal of speculation about how it would change the mobile content marketplace. Undoubtedly, the merger would further promote the “any time, any place,” content model, but it would also continue to concentrate the media market. This powerhouse partnership, if it were to come to pass, would give Time Warner and Sprint a so-called “quadruple play,” which would allow the partnership to offer a bundled package of high-speed Internet, television, long-distance, and wireless telecommunication services.

Singapore, long a central shipping hub for the distribution of physical goods throughout Asia, now wants to be Asia's hub for the distribution of digital goods, as well. To realize that goal, and to cash in on its telecommunications infrastructure investments, the Singapore government has formed a trade association called the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

Because the confusion of archiving and compliance is enough to defeat the most determined of executives, a group has come together to offer best practices and resources for companies struggling with email and IM compliance: the Electronic Communications Compliance Council, or TE3C. While the name may not roll off the tongue, it suggests the council’s approach to compliance action—take it slow.

Featured Stories

Much of the impetus for examining CMS usability has come from systems users themselves, but as customer cries grow louder, vendors are examining the very meaning of usability. In this first of two articles, I’ll offer a general introduction to the problem of CMS usability with a focus on contributor interfaces.

A year ago I would have said that the XML-based RSS protocol is still way too geeky for mainstream users, but RSS is catching on at a remarkable rate. The question is, how will content companies profit from its popularity?

Despite displays getting smaller, brighter, and more energy-efficient, they pale in comparison to the portability, readability, and feel of paper—still the medium of choice for the printed word. The electronic version of old faithful, epaper, may promise a new chapter in content delivery. geoff daily

Columns

I have been putting off writing this column for months, but I think it is time to come out and say it. Now is the time to ready your content for cell phone delivery. What seemed like a pipe dream of mobile telcos a year ago—getting people to draw down data and entertainment through their cell phones—is now close to the proverbial tipping point, and it is time for any recognizable content brand to stake a claim on the mobile phone frontier.

I am one of many who rode the XML content roller coaster up: high hopes for the use of SMIL in multimedia; SVG for graphics; create-once and reuse many times for everything from office documents to highly-disciplined technical documentation. And down: Microsoft ignored SMIL and SVG; few office workers ever mastered using MS Word styles that could provide additional document structure. What hope was there for the discipline and promise of XML?

A feature of the very successful Intranets 2004 conference was the number of presentations that were given on portal application development. One of the best of these was given by Hewlett Packard’s director of knowledge and intranet management, Barbara Williams, who indicated that the HP HR portal was generating savings of around $50 million a year from the investment in the portal. That is a very encouraging ROI.

With all the political blog hype during the 2004 election cycle, many observers missed the quieter emergence of blogs in the business world. My guess is that we're just getting going here and that business blogs will grow rapidly in numbers and importance. I'd predict that before long blogs will displace many existing KM technologies for information sharing inside businesses as well as communication tools used by organizations to reach external audiences.